CBGBコミュのRIP Hilly Kristal

CBGB'sのオーナーHilly Kristal氏（７５歳）が８月２９日に亡くなりました。
長い間、肺がんを患っていたそうです。

(08-29) 08:25 PDT New York (AP) -- Hilly Kristal, whose dank Bowery
rock club CBGB served as the birthplace of the punk rock movement and
a launching pad for bands like the Ramones, Blondie and the Talking
Heads, has died. He was 75.

Kristal, who lost a bitter fight last year to stop the club's
eviction
from its home of 33 years, died Tuesday at Cabrini Hospital after a
battle with lung cancer, his son Mark Dana Kristal said Wednesday.


Last October, as the club headed toward its final show with Patti
Smith, Kristal was using a cane to get around and showing the effects
of his cancer treatment. He was hoping to open a Las Vegas
incarnation
of the infamous venue that opened in 1973.


"He created a club that started on a small, out-of-the-way skid row,
and saw it go around the world," said Lenny Kaye, a longtime member
of
the Patti Smith Group. "Everywhere you travel around the world, you
saw somebody wearing a CBGB T-shirt."


While the club's glory days were long past when it shut down, its
name
transcended the venue and become synonymous with the three-chord
trash
of punk and its influence on generations of musicians worldwide.


The club also became a brand name for a line of clothing and
accessories, even guitar straps; its store, CBGB Fashions, was moved
a
few blocks away from the original club, but remained open.


"I'm thinking about tomorrow and the next day and the next day, and
going on to do more with CBGB's," Kristal told The Associated Press
last October.


Kristal started the club in 1973 with the hope of making it a mecca
of
country, bluegrass and blues - called CBGB & OMFUG, for "Other Music
For Uplifting Gourmandisers" - but found few bands to book. It
instead
became the epicenter of the mid-1970s punk movement.


"There was never gourmet food, and there was never country
bluegrass,"
his son said Wednesday.


Besides the Ramones and the Talking Heads, many of the other
sonically
defiant bands that found frenzied crowds at CBGB during those years
became legendary - including Smith, Blondie and Television.


Smith said at the venue's last show that Kristal "was our champion
and
in those days, there were very few."


Throughout the years, CBGB had rented its space from the building's
owner, the Bowery Residents' Committee, an agency that houses
homeless
people.


In the early 2000s, a feud broke out when the committee went to court
to collect more than $300,000 in back rent from the club, then later
successfully sought to evict it. By the time it closed, CBGB had
become part museum and part barroom.


At the club's boarded-up storefront Wednesday morning, fans left a
dozen candles, two bunches of flowers and a foam rubber baseball bat
-
an apparent tribute to the Ramones' classic "Beat on the Brat." A
spray-painted message read: "RIP Hilly, we'll miss you, thank you."


Other survivors include his wife, Karen, and daughter, Lisa.